Rails has been accepted into the Google Summer of Code 2014. The rules state that you have to be at least 18 years old to participate before April 21st, 2014, that you have to be a full or part-time student, and that you have to be passionate about improving Rails. If you’re accepted, you’ll actually be paid $5500 over the course of 3 months to complete your proposed project to improve Rails.

We recently announced part 1 of a blog series by Karol Galanciak called Test-Driven Rails. Part 2 is a continuation of that, describing a popular use case for writing tests: implementing a user registration system. The focus is on writing acceptance tests using Capybara, or in other words making sure the feature works from the user’s perspective. This post is a great illustration of making decisions in your application with test-driven and behavior-driven development.

When you need an authorization solution for a Rails app, you might think of CanCan by Ryan Bates. Since Ryan has been taking a break recently, Bryan Rite from MojoLingo forked the gem into a new one called CanCanCan. The gem doesn’t change the CanCan namespace at all so it’s a drop-in replacement except for the Gemfile change. Version 1.7.0 was released recently with strong_parameters support, multiple abilities with associations, and a bunch of overdue bug fixes.

Building your first Ruby gem may seem like a daunting task, but it's actually not so bad. Matt Huggins has written a step-by-step guide to building your first Ruby gem. There’s even a video tutorial and source code for his examples. If you’re interested in learning how to write a gem, this is the blog post for you.

Ruby Heroes are being awarded at Rails Conf, which is taking place April 22nd through the 25th. So, now is the time to nominate your unsung heroes who are busy producing educational content, developing plugins and gems, contributing to open-source projects, or putting on events to help developers learn and grow.

Previous Episodes

Running your own CI with Drone and Docker, building web-based RubyMotion apps with Under OS, funding for the Hello Ruby book, rubygems.org operating costs, Rails 4 assets on Heroku, and turning your text on its head with flippit all in this episode of the Ruby5.

It's pattern-mania this week with: interactors, adapters and components-based architectures. Omniref allows us to take a step back to look at dependencies between popular Ruby libraries and we learn about RubyMotion gotchas for Rails developers.